Standards-Based Lessons

Ask yourself: What do you think are the most significant parts of a standards-based lesson?

Steps for Standards-Based Lessons

1. Identify the standards and key elements
   • Which standards have your students mastered, are working on, need?
   • Personally evaluate or assess your students' needs (district tests, classroom work, observations, etc.)
   • Review the specific underlying components that are needed to allow you to say the student has mastered the standard.
2. Combine and connect
• Look for and begin to recognize the areas where standards overlap. There are natural connections between subjects and you can work on more than one standard at a time.
3. Design assessments
   • Assessments are designed at the beginning of a lesson or unit, not at the end.
   • Create rubrics, scoring guides, and activities that help make understanding and mastery of the standard more clear.
   • Collect models of exemplary work by students of the same age that show acceptable performance.
4. Expand instructional practices
• Use the best available research on ways to reach all students. (See Best Practices)
5. Consider culminating tasks and instructional units
• Create units when the standards can naturally combine to answer a driving question, when different subjects (math, social studies, science, geography) are unified naturally, or when a large topic is motivating to the students (age-appropriate, local resources are available, etc.)
6. Begin, starting now, to use standards-based lessons.
   • Do you already have lessons that are standards-based? Review your own practices and files of lessons. Ask yourself every time you look at a lesson (from your own files, a textbook, or from the web): Can this lesson be saved?
   • Discard lessons that do not:
     • Clearly match important standards that your students need
     • Provide introduction, instruction or reinforcement to an identifiable standard
     • Have student activities that produce measurable outcomes
     • Have appropriate resources readily available
   • Save and rewrite borderline lessons. Rewrite lessons to include:
     • Standards: Align the lesson to address an important standard that is needed by your students
     • Time: Amount of time reflects the importance of the learning being accomplished
     • Activities: include a wider variety of approaches that address all learning types
     • Assessments: understandable scoring guides or other ways to measure achievement that reflects progress toward mastering the standard being worked on
     • Integration: work with colleagues in other subject areas to share the teaching, reinforcement and re-teaching of concepts that have natural connections

For more information:
Reeves, Douglas. Making Standards Work: How to Implement Standards-Based Assessments in the Classroom, School, and District. Denver, Co.: Center for Performance Assessment, 2002.